The world is getting bigger, moving faster and changing more rapidly than ever before. Wicked, intractable problems have our leading experts scratching their heads with uncertainty about what’s in store for our collective future.
Education for sustainable development (ESD) is the foremost field responsible for equipping change agents with the skills they need to not only navigate this uncertainty but also steer it in a direction that betters the world. To do this, change agents need tools that help them transform the world outside of themselves, which involves also transforming their personal worlds within.
At the heart of ESD is the goal of transforming society by “empower[ing] learners to take informed decisions and responsible actions for environmental integrity, economic viability and a just society, for present and future generations, while respecting cultural diversity [1].”
These are UNESCO’s words, the leading UN agency that is directing the conversation and practices of ESD. Their recommendations go on to use words like “transformational” and “holistic” to describe the type of education we need; calling for approaches that revamp the epistemological and pedagogical approaches we take in the classroom itself.
Much of the focus of ESD in higher education is on training students in research and problem-solving skills that can be applied to the design of programs, policies and interventions for governments, nonprofit organizations, social enterprises, development banks and communities. This ranges from conditional cash transfer programs in Latin America, to training subsistence farmers in sustainable agriculture practices in Sub Saharan Africa, to the decarbonization of local economies in the United States. The ESD field teaches students about the interconnectedness of economic, political, social and environmental issues and how to systematically design solutions for them using evidence-based tools.
Since the late 1990’s, ESD has shifted best practices away from a strictly input-oriented focus on content towards an outcome-oriented focus on competencies that are key to taking action in the real world [2]. Through one of the most robust literature reviews on ESD, Wiek et al (2011) identified key competencies students are expected to walk away with from sustainability courses in higher education: systems thinking, anticipatory thinking, normative competence, strategic competence, interpersonal competence and integrated thinking.
Although competencies such as interpersonal and normative skills are inherently related to personal development, Wiek et al’s research shows that very little curriculum explicitly targets the development of students’ emotional, psychological and spiritual capacities for engaging with world change.
Rieckmann, 2018 added self-awareness to the list of ESD competencies in his chapter of the UNESCO book, Learning to Transform the World: Key Competencies in Education for Sustainable Development. He describes it as “the ability to reflect on one's own role in the local community and (global) society, continually evaluate and further motivate one's actions, and deal with one's feelings and desires.”
We Heal for All seeks to expand upon practices and literature of self-awareness for ESD that help people be effective, lifelong change agents in a complex and fast changing world. By using student’s emotional, psychological and spiritual experiences with world change as an entry point for reflection and learning, students can develop:
Emotional and psychological resilience to crisis, uncertainty and volatility that is needed to sustain long term engagement with complex topics.
Socioemotional and relational skills needed for collaboration, multi-stakeholder engagement and advocacy.
Clear sense of their values and personal drive for their professional path and lifestyle choices.
The ability to analyze the worldviews they carry, and therefore gain a deeper understanding of the cultural patterns they subconsciously practice.
A personal vision for what a sustainably developed world looks like to them, which can inform their career paths and be a source of motivation.
As we as educators continue to help students expand their minds to think in complex ways, discern and artfully use mass amounts of information, and harness the energy of challenging emotions about the world they’ve inherited, it is more clear than ever that we need curriculum that takes a whole-systems approach to the way we develop future leaders. This approach must include the emotional, psychological and spiritual dimensions of a student’s learning so that long term engagement can be sustained and true structural transformation can take place.